The Israeli Embassy in Dublin has apologized after it posted a derogatory message on their Facebook wall for the holiday season on Monday.

A “Christmas thought,” suggesting that if Jesus lived in the modern world he would “probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians,” was deleted from the official Facebook page of Israel’s embassy in Ireland on Monday. A second message was later posted, giving credit for the thought to a Facebook friend of the embassy, named Daniel.

Both posts were later deleted from the Facebook wall and then replaced with an apology “to anyone who may have been offended.”

Derek O’Flynn, a press officer for the embassy in Dublin, told The New York Times he did not know who posted the message online.

“People who post on the embassy Facebook page include embassy staff and also people based in Israel itself,” O’Flynn wrote in an e-mail.

“We don’t know who actually made the original post. All I know is that when it was brought to our attention, we here in the embassy deleted it immediately and posted the new message in its place.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, "Removing the post is of course the right thing to do, and as far as we are concerned that is the end of the story," he said.

"We will of course carry out an internal investigation to find out how such a post was published, but his is an internal matter, in order to make sure this won't happen again. Facebook is a very informal channel, which is essentially not diplomatic, and as such it is customary to post informal statements. Clearly, however, when anyone feels hurt it is important to apologize and remove the problematic post, and the embassy was right when it did this."